Many providers of telecommunications services such as Internet access offer subscribers the option of a discount for sharing data usage with other related subscribers. For example, a particular subscriber may order a shared data service in connection with his or her mobile device account and may request that additional mobile devices used by the subscriber's family members be associated with the shared data service. As a result, the data service purchased by the subscriber is then shared by the mobile devices of the family members such that, at billing time, total data usage of the family members and the subscriber is considered consolidated under the shared data service instead of billed individually under each family member's device.
Typically, to establish associations between the subscriber's shared service and the devices that are to share in the service, the subscriber must communicate with the customer service department of the telecommunications service provider. This may be done by telephone or via the Internet, and involves the subscriber requesting that a new device, such as a family member's mobile data number (MDN), be associated with or “added” to the shared service.
Conventional service delivery systems employed by telecommunications service providers to sign up, provision and bill subscribers include a customer relationship management application (CRM) such as a Siebel CRM. A customer service representative interacts with the CRM application to establish and maintain subscribers' accounts. Based on the interactions the customer service representative has with the CRM system, whether to establish a new subscriber, to modify the services to be accessed by a particular subscriber, or to do some other customer service operation, the CRM system will make modifications and additions to records in its own CRM database and will request modifications and additions of other modules in the service delivery system, such as billing modules, orchestration modules, provisioning modules, and the like. In some service delivery systems supporting multiple complex operations between various subsystems, the communications between the various modules in the service delivery system may be conducted using messaging via a middleware application, such as an Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) module.
With such a conventional service delivery system, when a customer service representative is asked by a subscriber owner of a sharable service, such as a sharable data service, to link that sharable service with a particular other subscriber's device in order to enable the other subscriber to share in the service, the subscriber owner instructs the customer service representative with the MDN (mobile device number i.e., the phone number) of the other subscriber's device. In turn, the customer service representative goes through a process of creating an order using the CRM application to add the sharable service to the other subscriber's device.
Creating an order is complex process in a CRM system that allows a customer service representative to create, modify or terminate a customer's service. Generating a modification order, for example, typically requires the system to generate a user interface with a complex series of screens, business logic and prompts in order to guide the customer service representative through the order creation process. Once the user has the completed the complex sequence of entries for a given order, the order is submitted for processing. At this point, the system decomposes the order into a series of several transactions for causing the various components of the customer management, billing and provisioning platforms to react in some way to put their respective aspects of the overall order into place.
While a subscriber requesting a modification such as this does not have to know how the service delivery system enables a customer service representative to carry out the subscriber's instructions, the subscriber typically has to wait for minutes for each order the customer service representative prepares and submits to the service deliver system. Any waiting can be frustrating for a subscriber, but it can particularly frustrating to wait through the preparation of several such orders when the subscriber is requesting several modifications to the membership of the sharing group. For example, adding one or more members and/or removing one or more members requires a multi-minute order to be prepared and submitted in respect of each of the members. As such, because of the ways typical service delivery systems are constructed, and how their various subsystems are to be addressed and integrated, the typical process of modifying members of a sharing group takes far longer and is far more frustrating than the customer would normally perceive is necessary.
Furthermore, in addition to the speed or turnaround factor at the customer service level, orders once submitted typically implicate and communicate with several of the subsystems or require a development consideration at the CRM level as to all of the subsystems that could be implicated or communicated with, even for simple modifications. The system resources that are consumed in time and processing therefore can outweigh the time and processing actually needed to make a simple intended modification such as adding or removing a user from a sharing group. Furthermore, in the event that a subsystem is itself upgraded or otherwise modified, the ordering process must be carefully scrutinized for possible upgrading, even for use cases that involving simply adding or removing members from a sharing group. This can increase development and upgrading time and cost.
It is an object of an aspect of the following to provide a method and system that can streamline the process of modifying membership in discount sharing groups, so that the customer service process is simplified, so that modifications can be done faster, and so that modifications only implicate the required subsystem(s) and system resources that are required.